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  • The Cursillo Movement in America: Catholics, Protestants, & Fourth-Day Spirituality by Kristy Nabhan-Warren
  • Brian J. Clites
The Cursillo Movement in America: Catholics, Protestants, & Fourth-Day Spirituality. By Kristy Nabhan-Warren. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. 368pp. $29.95.

At its most ambitious, The Cursillo Movement in America is a treatise for “internationalizing the study of U.S. Catholicism” (xvii). Perhaps because of our tendency to circumscribe research within geographic borders, scholars have written little about Cursillo retreats, which Nabhan-Warren describes as “the most important Christian social movement in the late twentieth century” (xvi).

‘Cursillo’ is Spanish for ‘short course,’ in this case a style of weekend retreats that were a centerpiece of Catholic Action in Europe. The Cursillo de Cristiandad (CdC) is a three-day variant that originated in the 1940s on Mallorca, Spain, emphasizing that a layperson’s “friendship with Jesus would remake the world” (39). At a typical CdC weekend, 20 to 30 pre-screened “candidates” devote three days to activities and prayer aimed at refocusing their lives around an intimate relationship with Christ. Those who complete the weekend are known as Cursillistas. Having refashioned themselves into “the hands and feet of Christ” (2), Cursillistas “consider the Fourth Day to be the rest of their lives” (7).

In the introduction and chapter one, Nabhan-Warren recounts the institutional history of the CdC and the ideology of its founder, Eduardo Bonnín Aguiló. Disgruntled with the clericalism and hypermasculinity of the Santiago pilgrimage, Bonnín and his friends imagined a more gender-inclusive retreat that used “the language of a mystical Christ” (46).

Fueled in part by the ecumenical spirit of Vatican II, the CdC’s emphasis on spiritual intimacy spread the movement across denominational and geographic borders. Chapters two and three traverse the history of how Bonnín’s CdC was brought to the United States by Spanish Catholics, then spread back across the Atlantic by U.S. Protestants. In these early chapters, Nabhan-Warren charts the most provocative of her many theses, namely that “Mallorquín Catholics, American Catholics, and American Protestants, from the 1960s to the present, have wanted essentially the same thing: a powerful encounter with Christ and the Holy Spirit, a renewed self, and a community of supportive, loving individuals” (10).

Chapters three and four explore the history of five Protestant retreat organizations that claim lineage from Bonnín’s vision of a “living Christ”: Tres Dias, Walk to Emmaus, Via de Cristo, and the National Episcopal Cursillo. In chapters five and seven, Nabhan-Warren [End Page 73] blends critical history with her ethnographic observations of less official CdC offshoots.

Throughout the book, Nabhan-Warren uplifts key tensions within the CdC movement, while avoiding over-theorization. For example, “Bonnín never insisted that husbands make their weekend before their wives” (8), whereas in the United States, “wives who wish to go first must receive special permission from a priest” (154). Nabhan-Warren also scrutinizes the racial-linguistic divisions within U.S. CdC: “In the Spanish-speaking movement, lay Catholics tend to have more control, and in the English-speaking Cursillo movement clergy have greater involvement” (68). The requisite caveat that “not all cursillistas come away with positive associations” (165) is accompanied by a footnote soliciting studies of unhappy Cursillistas to complement this book.

Chapter six, “Feeding Bodies and Souls: Kairos Prison Ministry International,” is an outlier insofar as Nabhan-Warren uplifts the voices of her ethnographic subjects without critical examination. The author’s reluctance to critique KPMI is well summarized by the chapter’s subtitles, which include “Serving Up Love,” “Food, Love, and Fellowship,” “Agape, Agape, and More Agape,” and “I may still be in Prison but Now I’m Free.” In the section titled “Cookie Love,” Nabhan-Warren writes that “the Kairos ladies have come here to share what they consider to be the redemptive power of Christ,” where “the cookies also symbolize forgiveness” (214). Such rich ethnographic content would seem ideal for teaching in an undergraduate or graduate classroom, where students might be asked to harness their theoretical assignments in order to bring their own critical analysis to bear on KPMI’s ministry.

In sum...

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